[Starlink] Jamaican Starlink Outages and a hint of shared infrastructure

[J Pan]

yes, internet nowadays in the hands of isp's does not (only) route
packets but money ;-)
--
J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan at UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan
On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 3:19 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> This is actually a wider problem and it's not just a Starlink one. In
> grad school, we teach students what a wonderful thing this Internet is,
> and how it abounds with algorithms that find the shortest path and make
> life wonderful. In practice, most people who "buy Internet" don't look
> much past where their immediate physical connection terminates and what
> might be lurking upstream. I had dinner with the CEO of a REN a few
> years ago who complained bitterly that some university managers didn't
> understand that if they made them an offer to build a connection for
> them, it meant that they could get a dedicated fibre pair all the way to
> the other side of the world if they needed it. And of course their
> offering was a bit dearer than that of the local retail ISP who was also
> offering "X Gb/s" - but of course only going as far as their own
> infrastructure. From where the university traffic would have been
> travelling cattle class.
>
> This can also lead to weird effects globally. For example, much of the
> traffic between Japan and New Zealand *could* in principle trundle down
> to Guam and from there to Sydney and then to Auckland. Which would be
> kind of shortest path. And occasionally it does. But just as often, you
> see it crossing the Pacific to the US West Coast (or from Guam to
> Hawaii) and from there back to New Zealand. Why? Good question. Was it
> because US backhaul carriers were cheaper for a while with the US dollar
> being soft and the Australian / NZ currencies surging in comparison?
> Were there government incentives for carriers to let traffic run through
> US territory for intelligence access (if so, the NSA would have to fear
> a strong dollar I guess)?
>
> With Starlink, keeping traffic out of space might seem a bit weird given
> their 100 Gb/s lasers, but yes it does mean downlinking to
> infrastructure that may path-share with with the infrastructure you're
> seeking to back up. But lasering your traffic around means adding
> latency - the path may zig-zag badly or may even overshoot the target.
> Plus the latency won't be stable. So keeping traffic out of space isn't
> such a bad idea after all perhaps. Then again, Jamaica's fibre
> connectivity is by and large not great circle path either...
>
> On 25/06/2024 2:42 am, J Pan via Starlink wrote:
> > can you give the reference to the complaint so we can dive into it a
> > bit? once the user packet reaches the satellite, it needs to get to
> > the ground (sooner than later according to starlink's current
> > practice), which may run into the same fiber to tunnel the packet from
> > the landing ground station to the user's home pop. once at the pop,
> > most starlink pop's now have at least two neighbor pop's, so
> > theoretically, starlink has the capability to route packets to a
> > different landing ground station through inter-sat links and another
> > pop, if it can arrange so properly
> > --
> > J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan at UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 3:40 AM Inemesit Affia via Starlink
> > <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >> I don't live in Jamaica but I just saw a user complain his service goes out at the same time his local provider does.
> >>
> >> The provider is Flow Jamaica and they seem to get service via C&W Caribbean according to another poster.
> >>
> >> Service going out together likely means there's shared infrastructure. And buying Starlink as backup and having it fail hard without rerouting several times in a row is below expectations.
> >>
> >> There's another provider in Jamaica. Digicel that seems to have separate infrastructure but that might not be value for money to have alternative connectivity.
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> --
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
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